• Every exec whose company had worked with Palm sang their praises when it came to app development. The folks at Palm are eager, friendly, and know how to talk to developers and managers.

• WebOS is great for things like porting a social media experience to an app, but not so good for gaming and heavy multimedia. Palm has already started to address this issue, but it's an issue for sure. Apple sells a ton of games via their App Store.

• Depending on who I spoke with, Google's Android team was either okay or a total pain in the ass to deal with. One exec at a very well-known company (trust me, you've heard of them and either you or someone you know uses them regularly) told me they decided to ignore Android for the time being because of how Google dealt with them. "They wanted us to basically develop and submit our application on our own, where another company was very happy to work with us from the start to make sure we translated our onilne experience into a great experience custom tailored to their platform." This isn't a startup hoping to sell a few apps we're talking about, but a major brand that could do as much for Android (or iPhone OS or WebOS) as they could do for said brand. From what I heard, Google just wasn't interested in lending much bandwidth to the cause.

• Then again, a few other folks I spoke to said Google was generally pretty okay to deal with. If you're lucky enough to be working with Google and a carrier interested in your Android app, even better.

• Android has been something of a mess when it comes to Google's management of the platform and its developers. But it's gotten much better as of late, and seems to have rounded a corner towards maturity.

• A few folks told me their companies balked at Android development because of a lack of devices and exposure. They're waiting to see if that talk of "18 new Android phones before year's end" really bears fruit before sinking resources into Android apps.

• Apple's SDK is awesome for gaming and their employees are generally good to excellent to work with, but their app submission and approval process is just as frustrating as you've heard it is. Unless you've been hand-picked as a chosen partner, in which case you get loads of very helpful access to Apple brainpower, but also are often asked to develop and show off prototypes at breakneck pace.

• There's some concern that the Apple App Store is on the verge of collapsing under its own weight. "There are so many apps now, and so many iFart-type apps, that it's too easy for your product to get lost in the store. We see more potential for exposure in Google and Palm's stores since there's so much less saturation right now."

To wit, one of the winning companies in MobileBeat's startup competition was AppStoreHQ, which "aggregates and assigns a score to articles about iPhone applications on top tech blogs and on iPhone-focused sites. Then users can navigate that data by either just looking at recent coverage, or by looking at the best-reviewed applications."

• One exec told me that his team developed for all three platforms, and WebOS was far and away the easiest and best experience for engineers and managers alike.  "We'd already developed for iPhone so we had some experience to lean on, but our WebOS app took one-sixth the time the iPhone app did. My programmers were so much happier working on the WebOS version than the other two."

1. Palm's got a good thing going and is great to work with, but they need more devices on more carriers and a way to let programmers access Pre's hardware for serious game development.
2. Android is making progress and folks are cautiously optimistic about big things ahead, but working with Google has been a mixed bag at best.
3. Apple's App Store is where it's at if you want the biggest shot at the biggest bucks and access to the most robust and versatile SDK and hardware for all types of apps. Working with Apple can literally be a hit-or-miss proposition, though, and red flags are starting to be raised regarding the issue of App overload.
4. With BlackBerry and, perhaps, Microsoft poised to join the Age of the App Store (not to mention carriers like Verizon wanting in on the action), what's going to happen to veteran app store companies like Handango?

Of course we won't know anything for sure until next week's Apple media event, but if iLounge has its facts straight, it sounds like software access for iPhone and iPod Touch developers will be quite restricted and "the collective impact of Apple's decisions will be to control and stifle third-party development at a critical juncture in iPhone and iPod history, limiting what could be an open, thriving Mac-like collection of applications and accessories to a smaller, more stagnant iPod-like controlled environment."  Yikes.

Apple will decide what apps get approved for distribution via the iTunes store, and rejected apps won't have any other supported means of seeing the light of day.  Beyond that, access to iPhone's accessory dock will be cut off, meaning that creative possibilities like snap-on keyboards and Delphi's wacky car control system don't stand much of a chance.

Thank goodness for jailbreaking, huh?

Read the details in iLounge's report on the iPhone/iPod SDK.

The iPhone SDK will allow third-party software development supported by Apple, and is likely to be accompanied by a slew of applications already created by developers who've been working with Apple over the past several months.  One of the major criticisms of iPhone has been its closed operating system which prevents developers from extending the handset's utility via user-installable software.  While Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Palm-based devices can be augmented by thousands of user-installable apps, iPhone users have thus far had to wait for Apple-controlled software updates to add functionality to their devices beyond so-called Web apps developed to run inside of iPhone's Safari Web browser. 

A robust hacker community has shown, however, that developing applications for iPhone is quite doable.  Without any support from Apple, developers have accessed iPhone's OS X operating system and built software packages that do everything from enable instant messaging to emulate classic video game consoles on the handset.  As such, the iPhone community has been anticipating the release of the SDK for quite some time now.

As Apple traditionally makes new product announcements on Tuesdays, we'll keep a close eye on Apple.com tomorrow to see if the iPhone SDK is, in fact, delivered before month's end as promised.

Read more about a possible iPhone SDK delay in BusinessWeek's Byte of the Apple blog.